The Broken Circuit: An Interview with Lauren Berlant

Sina Najafi, David Serlin, and Lauren Berlant

According to psychologist Silvan Tomkins, the child experiences shame when the object of desire, for example the mother, does not reciprocate and breaks the circuit of attachment. This leads to an emotional disorientation in which the child internalizes disconnection, thus creating the conditions for embarrassment and self-loathing. Many cultural theorists have adopted the notion of the “broken circuit” as a way of examining how specific social relations could shame members of marginalized groups and determine their experience as shamed subjects. But does the breaking of the circuit—some form of emotional disconnection—necessarily lead to self-loathing?

Lauren Berlant, the George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, has written extensively about the relationship between affective investments, practices of sociability, and questions of citizenship and community. For her, the self-loathing that we typically associate with the concept of shame is only one of many possible outcomes of the “broken circuit.” Sina Najafi and David Serlin spoke with Berlant by phone in July 2008.

Cabinet: When did contemporary cultural criticism begin grappling with the category of shame?

Lauren Berlant: In terms of charting a contemporary genealogy (i.e., one that doesn’t look to Erving Goffman’s Stigma (1963) or the modernist ethnographic convention of nominating shame and guilt cultures), we might begin with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, published in 1990, which asked questions about the relationship between socially marginalized identity categories and modes of psychological or affective subjectivity. In Sedgwick’s rephrasing of margin-center relations, populations that were associated with non-normative modes of life—in this case, queer and non-normative sexualities—were deemed to be shamed populations. I want to say something precise about what her revisionary operation entailed. What Sedgwick was saying was that a structural social relation—enacted by stipulated and administrative laws and norms—was shaming. She was adapting an affective language to a political analysis. At the same time, the shame of being deemed a member of that population was said to produce a shamed subjectivity, which meant a subjectivity that felt a lot of shame.

This particular arc of thinking about shame is probably related to St. Augustine’s claim that sexuality is at the center of the subject, that sexuality is definitively shameful, and that shamed sexualities produce shamed subjects who then have to negotiate life from a perspective of already being fallen and unworthy. Foucault criticized the model of sexuality that posits it as the subject’s truth, of course. As for Sedgwick, I think that this spreading mimeticism around shame (oppression works through shaming, and produces subjects organized by shame) is a very controversial claim about persons. At the time her ideas were first circulating, it was not deemed controversial but incredibly emancipatory, because they proposed an affective structure for a political relation. It explained how it would be possible to think of the structural subordination of a population in terms of an emotional map of the very identities of the people who were being named by it.

Stills from NBC’s reality television series The Biggest Loser.

I wouldn’t want to misrecognize the interest in shame as only coming
from Epistemology of the Closet, however. There was also a lot of
feminist work on interrupting sexuality as the site for the
reproduction of gendered shame that is never acknowledged enough. Angela
Davis, Gloria Anzaldúa, Shulamith Firestone, and Pat Califia, for
example, had long been busy trying to invent ways of thinking about how
sexual shame is actually a powerful register for trying to understand
what it means to be identified, or not identified, with the normativity
of a nation. Yet it was also incredibly dramatic for Sedgwick—and Judith
Butler, too, but Sedgwick especially—to make a claim that what looks
like a political structure is fundamentally an affective structure that
forms our subjectivity. I don’t think it can be overestimated how big
that shift was, but it was also a shift that came out of a long
discussion.

How does Sedgwick’s work fit within explorations of
shame by psychology?

In the mid-1990s, Sedgwick and Adam Frank
recovered the work of psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1911–1991) and
reintroduced it for scholars interested in the concept of shame.
Following Tomkins’s work, Sedgwick and Frank describe the experience of
shame structurally as the experience of a “broken circuit” of attachment
and desire that ought to circulate between the subject and its
treasured object. (Their presumption, I think, is that one can make
demands for reciprocity on both persons and worlds.) So if somebody has a
form of longing that gets attached to a person or world, the moment of
shame is when the person/world breaks its relation of reciprocity with
the subject. For Tomkins, shame occurs when a child experiences the
refusal of their attachment. When the child looks away because it feels
that it’s been refused or rejected by its mother, that is the exemplary
moment of shame.

In my own work, I argue that the feeling of the
world withdrawing from you and therefore throwing you back on yourself could
be described as shame, but that says nothing about the experience
of it. The broken circuit could also involve anger, numbness, hunger, a
desire to self-stimulate, a compulsion to repeat, the pleasure of a
recognition, grief, and/or curiosity, and these wouldn’t merely be
defenses against the impact of the pure feeling of shame, but actually
different responses to being affectively cut off.

Although the structure
of shame for Sedgwick and for Tomkins isn’t necessarily aligned with
the experience of shame, much work by scholars using shame as an
analytical category assumes that the structure and the experience of
shame are always aligned, that the broken circuit would be felt
as shame, a shame we would recognize as the conventional emotion. But
this is a mistake, and I think it occurs because the language of emotion
often produces a sense of generality and transparency that enables
things that aren’t very like each other to seem as if they are. So,
let’s ask again: what does it mean to shame X? Is de-shaming X the same
thing as de-repressing it? If I used to be ashamed of my queerness and
had to produce defenses around that shame, does delaminating shame from
my queerness also emancipate my sexuality? Is that emancipation the same
thing as being shameless? Is de-shaming queerness the same thing as
having pride? (This is what the Gay Shame movement is always asking.) My
point is that I want our discussions of affect and emotion not to
presume their clarity, coherence, or intensity of drama, nor to see them
as grounding the subject for better or worse in an identity or a
social population. The leveling effect of biopower (everyone in the
shamed population is alike defined by the shaming quality) is not lived a
priori coherently or homogeneously. But that’s an empirical
question.

For you, is this incoherence productive or
counter-productive?

What’s not productive is when people aspire
to an explanation of a social relation through the fantasy that the
emotional event tells a simple, clear, visceral truth about something.
One way my claims revise Foucault’s is that I think emotions, and not
sexuality, are what took up the place as the “truth” of the modern
subject. What we understand as sexuality was one among many scenes of
installing conventionality in the people who were defined according to
projections about their capacity to manage appetites and affects. So if I
say I’m a “shamed subject,” that represents me as someone who is
grounded by my own emotional self-understanding. On the other hand, this
concept of myself as affectively simple makes me seem more open to
change. If only! Also, if my shame is to represent injustice, then my
lack of shame should represent justice—and you know that’s not true,
because shamelessness can be a bullying mechanism or a defense too.

Negative
political feelings provide important openings for measuring injustice
but their presence or absence isn’t really evidence of anything. I might
be a bourgeois who thinks that the world owes people like me who work
hard an unprecarious life that will add up to something, too, but then
my sense of injury isn’t objectively a measure of injustice. It’s a
measure of wounded privilege. This is why I work against the idea that
emotions actually ground you somewhere in true justiceland. Emotion
doesn’t produce clarity but destabilizes you, messes you up, and makes
you epistemologically incoherent—you don’t know what you think, you
think a lot of different kinds of things, you feel a lot of different
kinds of things, and you make the sense of it all that you can. The
pressure on emotion to reveal truth produces all sorts of misrecognition
of what one’s own motives are, and the world’s. People feel relations
of identification and revenge that they don’t admire, and attachments
and aversions to things that they wouldn’t necessarily want people to know
that they have.

Stills from NBC’s reality television series The Biggest Loser.

It’s part of my queer optimism to say that
people are affectively and emotionally incoherent. This suggests that we
can produce new ways of imagining what it means to be attached and to
build lives and worlds from what there already is—a heap of
conventionally prioritized but incoherent affective concepts of the
world that we carry around. We are just at the beginning of
understanding emotion politically.

In your article
“Unfeeling Kerry,” you discuss how John Kerry lost the 2004 election in
part because of his shame over and subsequent disavowal of a certain
part of his own life, namely his post-Vietnam protests against the war,
which he imagined rejected his previous patriotic behavior as a soldier
in Vietnam. You argue that the electorate was not comfortable with the
lack of unity in Kerry evidenced by this shameful disavowal.

That
essay argues that one of the things that people are purchasing when
they decide to go with their “gut feelings” about a candidate—a phrase
about affective discernment that has wide currency now from Malcom
Gladwell and Stephen Colbert to Gerd Gigerenzer and George Lakoff—is
some sense of whether the candidate is affectively intelligible to them
at all. So what Bush represented—it was totally fictive, but he’s a good
actor—was a coherent masculinity at ease with itself, whereas Kerry
represented an incredible disavowal of the magnificent performance of
sovereignty and freedom from the need to be respected that he manifested
at the end of the Vietnam War. As a candidate he had to pretend that he
had just been a good soldier all along. Maybe he was a good soldier all
along, but that wasn’t the point. The reason that he was worthy of
respect wasn’t that he was a good soldier; it was that he used the
knowledge that he gained in Vietnam actually to break with the system.

He
was what Foucault might call a specific intellectual.

Exactly.
And when the system tells you it doesn’t respect you, you owe nothing
to it and can make yourself free. That sounds kind of hokey, but it’s an
important lesson about possible responses to the broken circuit other
than trying to reason with it, convince it, be a good teacher of it,
re-seduce it, or be pragmatic in a depressive collaboration. Anyway,
Kerry was proud of his freedom after the war, and then during his
presidential run he had to pretend that all along he was conventionally
patriotic, when actually he had been interfering with the terms of the
reproduction of patriotism itself.

We are interested in pursuing
shamelessness. Are you?

Not so much, because I am in the middle
of working through an almost antithetical theoretical problem about
sensing the historical present. It’s a kind of proprioceptive history
about the present as a relatively affectively formless space: this
project articulates models of affect management (anxious attachment
disorder and the like) with Lacanian conceptions of fantasy that see
life as a comedy of misrecognition and the Deleuzian project of
fomenting potentiality as the subject’s undoing. In contrast,
shamelessness is structured as a moment of clarity within normative
frames. But for you, I’m game!

You may be asking about
shamelessness as a political end and as a political tactic. These are
two different things. As a political end, I want the end of erotophobia,
the fear of sexuality as such that produces so much shaming pedagogy
around it. As a political tactic, shamelessness is the performative act
of refusing the foreclosure on action that a shamer tries to induce.
Stop masturbating, you idiot! But if I act shamelessly, I also might be
daring you to shame me again, and come to love the encounter with shame.
This shapes the hyperbolic spaces of outraged shamelessness in the
right-wing media. Bring shame on, they say, we’re shameless; so give us
your best shot!

Shamelessness as political tactic might also
perform freedom in the way I described before, the freedom to give up
getting legitimacy in normal terms. This may be what people respond to
in Barack Obama: there are things that he feels strongly about that he’s
not interested in justifying to anyone. Obama’s claim is a pretty
sentimental, practically contentless formal claim about “America” as the
name for the possibility of a social world, not one made of individuals
but one that’s fundamentally collective, interdependent, and
politically self-organized. He uses civil society language to say that
people should understand themselves and act fundamentally as members of
a public. He’s claiming that to commit to the process of an active
debate within a field of solidarity is what’s best about politics, and
that the idiom of policy is practically another scene altogether. So
he doesn’t care so much when people don’t like his particular political
decisions. He’s more invested in the process of fomenting publics that
desire the political. It’s a pretty shameless strategy, in the sense
that he is refusing the normative ideological contracts that have shaped
mainstream politics over the last 40 years.

Stills from NBC’s reality television series The Biggest Loser.

Could one identify
shamelessness, then, as an affect of neo-liberalism?

No, I
wouldn’t go there at all. I mean, think about civil rights actions. Look
at, for example, the class/biopolitics of the distribution of
composure. Whose forms of self-regulation get legitimated, whose forms
of self-regulation are ways of going under the radar, and whose forms of
self-regulation are in-your-face messages? For example, you go and sit
at a lunch counter where you’re not allowed and you refuse to act as
though you shouldn’t be there. And it freaks everybody out because
you’re not having the affect that they need you to have in order for
them to be outraged by it. So I think that shamelessness
doesn’t always have to be exuberant or confrontational. It can be a form
of the performance of composure in places where people don’t expect
it.

We often think of shamelessness in its most outrageous
manifestation.

That’s the problem in working on emotion—people
always imagine it hyperbolically and melodramatically. The structure of
shamelessness doesn’t necessarily involve in-your-faceness. It can
involve any frank refusal to produce the affect for you that you need
someone to have in order for you to feel in control of the situation of
exchange. It is to take control over the making and breaking of the
terms in which reciprocity will proceed, if at all. But it doesn’t have
to be big. What often happens when you refuse to provide
affective security for people is that they fall apart, get anxious, and
start acting out, often not knowing why. The affective event of
performative shamelessness initiates, therefore, the potential for
unraveling normative defenses. On the other hand, people often thrash
around like monsters in that situation, not having skills for
maintaining composure amidst the deflation of their fantasy about how
their world is organized. Take the whole question of academic gentility,
for example. How does the fear of being shamed, exposed, or losing face
foreclose potentiality (resistance, creativity) in any kind of
workplace, and what is the relation between public and cloaked forms of
control? Collaborative institutions are like big reality shows, theatres
of emotional performance in the guise of something else.

Speaking
of which, what role do you think reality TV programs play in making
visible the culture of shame?

In my work, sentimentality
operates when emotions communicate authenticity that enables
identification and solidarity among strangers. It doesn’t only mean that
if I cry on screen you feel sad; it also means that if I’m exuberant on
screen, you feel exuberant, too, or if someone humiliates me on screen,
you might not only feel schadenfreude, but you might also take
pleasure in my survival. When I talk in general about sentimental
culture, it’s a scene of emotional transmission that reveals the
affective intensities of the everyday by showing what’s overwhelming and
providing a gratifyingly simplified distillation of experience. So in
that regard, reality TV is an extension of sentimental culture rather
than its opposite. We’re used to thinking that sentimentality is about
the risk of sociality and the need to survive suffering, but narratives
about this can take place in many idioms—comedy, irony, romance, satire,
and other genres of intensity with a pedagogical edge.

I don’t
watch a lot of reality TV, but I have seen something recently that
interested me—The Biggest Loser, which I had a student working on
so I had to watch, and I wept while watching it, because people are so
shockingly naked on it. This show is the only place in America where you
get to be a loser and it’s a good thing. In a larger sense, it’s about
managing people’s feelings of loss everywhere. But this show is also
about a culture of shamed appetites, and in that sense it’s also about
contemporary sexuality.

With shows like Survivor, you
have the other problem of getting voted off if you’re too good at the
game, so it’s also about strategies of mediocrity, about staying below
the radar. That’s also really interesting. On The Biggest Loser,
people actually cry when they vote a friend off because he or she was
too good at the game. Therefore reality TV is not only about dramas of
humiliation and victory, but about other forms of networking and
collegiality in which you don’t try to be extra great—you just try to be
competent so you’re perceived as reliable.

Being normal is a
nervous place, because you can never finish performing your relation to
it; on the other hand, being comfortable is also another way of thinking
about what normativity provides, because if you can pass as normal then
you can scoot under the radar. The whole question of how you lubricate
the social never stops being difficult, and it never stops being a
matter of shame, because when one confronts one’s ambivalence and
incoherence one feels in a bad faith relation to the model of ethical
solidity we expect from ourselves. But what if we just trained ourselves
to accept that all of us are incoherent, subject to a variety of
aversive and connective impulses that we are always managing? The social
then would be a totally different space of intimacy and anxiety.

Lauren Berlant teaches English at the University of Chicago. Recent work
related to affect, politics, and aesthetics includes The Queen of America Goes
to Washington City (Duke University Press, 1997), The Female Complaint
(Duke University Press, 2008), and, as contributor and editor, Intimacy (University
of Chicago Press, 2000), Compassion (Routledge, 2004), and On the
Case, a special issue of Critical Inquiry (2007). Her book, Cruel Optimism, is
forthcoming. She can also be found at supervalentthought.wordpress.com.

David Serlin is associate professor of communication and science studies at
the University of California, San Diego, and an editor-at-large for Cabinet. He
is the author of Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America
(University of Chicago Press, 2004).